For a long time now, he’s paid witness to the optimism that powers this boy’s brittle psyche — one that pulses with a daunting might through its pitiful, crudely-taped cracks; one that shines relentlessly through optic wells of azure blue, wells beneath which he (with merely a fraction of his cynical awareness) can discern an ocean’s worth of untamed wonders, springing lavishly from the soul and blossoming generously forth in an abundance of smiles and laughter and echoes of an everlasting vibrance.

He’s intrigued, fairly. By these…. wonders he finds swimming freely about in the glaring vacancies that litter this boy’s being, as laughably far-fetched as they seem.

And it is in light of this discovery that — deep in the recesses of his own twisted, knotted mind — he senses a queer shift in the vital patterns of the wretched, morbid thoughts that lurk beneath its shadowy folds. Amidst dreams that pile in through the night, he finds them seething with all-new desires — cravings he’s never known — as they wrap obsessively around the prospect of picking this–

–sad, sorry… strangely beautiful boy’s soul apart and letting it crumble to the rotten pieces its feeble sutures once strove (–so very, very… painfully hard–) to keep intact. And perhaps then, he can scavenge for the light that once used to linger stubbornly on, now a withering flicker amidst fragments of a cardiac husk.

It is beneath the shelter of the night that he nurses these thoughts, fingers curling and unraveling in eerie sync with the rhythm of his malevolent cognitions. He lies, still amidst a tangle of sheets, golden eyes shifting ambiguously beneath a bedraggled curtain of raven-coloured locks, as he revels in the images of him — a sun-lit, stalwart angel whose light he’d more than love to sap dry, in a self-fulfilling extraction.

After all, he muses, a void such as he could accommodate anything.

An endless, murky void–

purposeless and wrought with a perpetual need—

He is yearning, he realizes, and at once, he overrides the suffocating, lung-piercing odour of dependency that comes hovering in with the cleverly contrived notion of a desire for dominance. Much more apt, he figures, satisfied.

–But it changes not the fact that he is yearning.

He seethes at the thought, and at the same time, he is — as always — intrigued.

Now intrigued at the lengths to which he will go and claim this light for himself.

Of a sun-lit, stalwart angel, one enamoured by tales of camaraderie–

–He has none of that to offer. Nothing but the void with which he was born, the void of which he is fully, so horrendously composed.

But he frets not as he turns, caving slowly in to slumber, for the malicious snares that adorn his mind are still intact.

And it is with this assurance that a smirk weaves through, as he pictures feathers raining ominously down on an endless terrain of black — each one resounding with the seconds that it takes for him to drift into sleep.

And, true to the nature of a boy carved from nothingness, the relish of anguish lives on in his dreams.